+++
title = "What-is-a Clickbait"
date = 2022-09-25
+++

Disclaimer
==========

This continues some thoughts from a previous post[^1].

I decided not cite the whatisabait (more on that term below) arguments
whether text or video. I just don\'t want to associate my blog with them
directly.

Titles, addresses, honourifics, etc
===================================

Please note, I will use the word title mean all of these, for lack of my
own better understanding.

Before I get to the main topic I want to add this:

In my previous post I mentioned that \"San\" might work as a good
replacement in English for Ms, Mr, etc. At the time of writing I
explicitly had thought of the Japanese origin of the word. But a day or
two later it occurred to me that many Romance Languages already use that
for what English already has for Saint or St. So to avoid that possible
ambiguity I take back \"San\" as a recommendation, at least for a prefix
position title. However, my recommendation for an abstract or general
title remains.

And now the main topic...

All the \"what is a...\" clickbait
==================================

I don\'t remember when I started seeing these, but \"what is a woman\"
and the mostly YouTuber clickbait is just a bunch of trash. Like before,
I\'ll appeal to the software engineers out there, but anyone who has
ever had to refactor their code already knows that once something has
been defined, if something new gets added and there\'s a conflict, it
doesn\'t mean the original doesn\'t work. You just update the logic,
bump the version, and move on. And so I call all of this clickbait
because that\'s what it is, unless for some case someone didn\'t ever
actually know. Hello Data, and now we\'re back to appealing to Trekkies
as I did in the previous post.

And just like software, it\'s never really done. People freaked out
about \"what is a planet\" a few years ago. Poor Pluto. My main gripe
with all of that relating to my tendency to want to call all exoplanets
also planets. Or maybe also that gas giants and Earth/Venus/Mercury
rocks all planets. Those don\'t matter in terms of communication. But
for the clickbait, these people are just trying to disrupt or act like
experts on something they either know nothing about or have no rational
process to address their own thoughts other than cashing in on that
sweet monetization.

So what is a planet? Planets orbit a star, clears its own orbit, blah
blah. So why not Pluto? Not big enough. Even NASA writes that \"This
seemingly simple question doesn\'t have a simple answer\". Though, take
note that in this case, NASA asks \"What is a Planet?\" with sincerity
and with an actual answer[^2].

Okay but what is a woman?
=========================

For my own working definition, based on what I know and what I wrote
about last time, \"woman\" is currently the gender normatively
associated with female humans. So by contrast, \"man\" or what I dubbed
\"karlman\" is the gender normatively associated with male humans. From
that I imply that gender does not equate to sex. So what is sex? It\'s
something related to reproduction and/or sexual preference. And whether
or not I\'m wrong, I\'m going to stop there because my point is that
defining things works like this for anything. And I could have picked
anything, but planets just seemed like the most recent thing that was
big in the news media where folks either actually had trouble accepting
the definition or where it had some political reason.

I suppose instead of planets I could have also brought up racism,
fascism, assault rifles, or machine guns. Great, now I\'ve appealed to
\"both\" sides.

Whatisabait
===========

The insincere \"what is a\" argument feels like a close cousin to
whataboutism. I think coining a term might be a good idea.
\"Whatisabait\" feels odd to me, but that doesn\'t mean it\'s wrong,
just new. Those asking \"what is a\" (or perhaps sometimes just \"what
is\") don\'t actually care about the answer. They\'re usually trying to
discredit some else\'s thoughts by pointing out absurdities.

Footnotes {#footnotes .unnumbered}
=========

[^1]: [English Language Pronouns](language_2022-07-07_pronouns.org)

[^2]: [What is a Planet? \| Planets -- NASA Solar System
    Exploration](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/in-depth/)
